Sometimes there are company reports from non-U.S. companies that are just too important to pass up. That was the case for Proteome Sciences PLC out of the United Kingdom on Tuesday. The company has announced that the publication of a study that it has co-authored with King’s College London — a positive blood test that could become an identifier predicting who will see the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

The company claims to have accuracy of 87%.

Two additional things stood out here. The first is that it was represented as the largest study of its kind to date, and second was that it could become the benchmark toward developing a blood test for the disease.

This in no way signifies a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but it could radically change how the onset of Alzheimer’s disease is identified. Proteome Science’s test identifies a set of 10 proteins in the blood and it analyzed more than 1,000 individuals.

The researchers used data from three international studies and said that blood samples were taken from 1,148 individuals. The group was represented as 476 patients with Alzheimer’s, another 220 with “Mild Cognitive Impairment” and 452 elderly controls without dementia. They were analyzed for 26 proteins previously shown to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease. A sub-group of 476 individuals across all three groups also had an MRI brain scan.

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Researchers identified 16 of these 26 proteins to be strongly associated with brain shrinkage disease within a year. Proteome Science’s press release said:

There are currently no effective long-lasting drug treatments for Alzheimer’s, and it is believed that many new clinical trials fail because drugs are given too late in the disease process. A blood test could be used to identify patients in the early stages of memory loss for clinical trials to find drugs to halt the progression of the disease.

Please note: The U.K. study, which was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, was shown to be the result of an international collaboration led by King’s College London and Proteome Sciences. It was funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK, the U.K. Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre and Proteome Sciences.

A link has been provided from the Proteome Sciences website. In late day trading, Proteome Sciences’ shares were up almost 16%.

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